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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

While all his Pittsburgh
Steelers teammates hid in the locker room rather than be put in the position of
taking a stand on the protests currently sweeping the National Football League,
one player stood apart and stood tall on Sunday for the playing of the national
anthem.

The controversy, as
everyone in the known universe is painfully aware now, was kicked off last year
by former 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who began sitting or kneeling
during “The Star-Spangled Banner” at game time to protest the “oppression of
people of color” in America. A slow trickle of other players gradually followed
suit.

Last Friday,
President Trump added fuel to the fire when he suggested at a rally in Alabama that
any “son of a bitch” who “disrespects our flag” should be fired. This virtually
guaranteed that many players who otherwise might not get involved would feel
compelled to push back, and indeed, there was a surge of protests during last
weekend’s games.

Members of both the
Ravens and Jaguars, for example, took
a knee while the national anthem was played ahead of their game in London.
More than a dozen Cleveland Browns and at least ten Indianapolis Colts knelt
before their contest. The Dallas Cowboys and their owners did likewise just before
the anthem at their Monday night game. Thousands of spectators booed in each
instance, and the hills
were alive with the sound of countless fans at home collectively switching
off their TVs in disgust.

Friday, September 22, 2017

The Land of the Free
is facing a crisis of freedom. A new
study from the University of California at Los Angeles polled 1,500
students at four-year universities about their views on free speech. The
results are disheartening, to say the least.

Forty-four percent of
the student respondents believe that the First Amendment does not protect “hate
speech.” Sixteen percent answered “don't know,” and only 39 percent answered
correctly. Disturbingly, not even conservative students seemed to understand
First Amendment protections: only 44 percent said that hate speech is protected, compared to 39 percent of
Democrats and 40 percent of Independents.

A stunning 51
percent of students thought that “shouting so that the audience cannot hear”
was a valid tactic for opposing a controversial speaker. Violence as a means of
shutting down a speaker was acceptable to 19 percent, or one out of five, of respondents.

“The majority of students
appear to prefer an environment in which their institution is expected to
create an environment that shelters them from offensive views,” the study
concludes.

This is concerning
for many reasons, but the most urgent one is that our culture has reached the
point of hysteria about an imaginary tide of neo-Nazis threatening to turn
America into the Fourth Reich. White supremacists – a discredited fringe of politically
impotent, openly despised losers – suddenly loom large in our collective
consciousness thanks to a relentless propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by
the left-leaning press, to demonize President Donald Trump and right-wingers in
general as literal Nazis.

Feminist icon Kate
Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Obituary portraits and
reminiscences of the author of Sexual
Politics and other books ranged from respectful to reverential to “tongue-tied
fangirldom.” But what has the legacy of her brand of feminism truly been?

Sexual Politics, Millett’s first book,
traced the insidious ways she claimed that the “patriarchy” was
institutionalized throughout the culture and kept women repressed, often
unconsciously so. The “fundamental instrument” of patriarchy, she declared, was
the family unit, which encouraged women to embrace their own conformity to the
system. Real liberation was only possible by casting off the chains of a
woman’s traditional role of wife and mother. Critic Irving Howe observed that the
book displayed such little interest in children that it was as if it had been
written by a female impersonator.

Called “the Bible of Women’s Liberation” by the New York Times, the 1970 book had a seismic effect on feminist
thought and launched her as what the Timescalled
“a defining architect of second-wave feminism.” In a cover story that same
year, TIME magazine crowned her “the
Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.” Fellow feminist Andrea Dworkin said that
Millett woke up a sleeping world.

I am friends with
Kate’s sister Mallory, whose perspective on her sibling gives some necessary
insight into the true nature of the feminist vision. In a riveting article from
a few years back bluntly titled, “Marxist
Feminism’s Ruined Lives,” she shared what she saw of the subversive undercurrent
of her sister’s passionate radicalism.

The culture leans
sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means
conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs
at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for
example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below
it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics
in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The
left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid
whining, but they are very real indeed.

This was far from
the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings
on the Times’ all-important bestseller
list. Cortney
O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell:
The Untold Story of America's Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author
couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er)
side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was
perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The
New York Times did have the book at No. 13 on its “Combined
Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved No. 4 slot among bestselling nonfiction
titles.

“It's not only an
insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said
“but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy
the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across
America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

The left spent eight years gushing about
Michelle Obama as a First Lady style icon second only to – if anyone – Jackie O.
Embraced enthusiastically by the fashion world, Michelle appeared on magazine
covers from InStyle to Glamour to Vogue (multiple times). At
the end of Barack’s Oval Office tenure, HuffPost even posted a farewell piece
to Michelle titled, “Michelle
Obama Breaks Hearts With Final Vogue Cover As First Lady.” “Looking
ethereal in a white Carolina Herrera gown, she is, as usual, the epitome of
elegance and grace,” HuffPost fawned breathlessly.

Last year, with Michelle on her way out, the heartbroken
left, looking forward to Hillary Clinton as President, began to wax
enthusiastic about Hillary’s “presidential”
pantsuits. Had she won the election, there is no question that fashion critics
would then have spent the next four years wracking their brains finding ways to
praise Hillary’s boxy,
Mao-inspired,
solid-printtents.
But Donald Trump burst that bubble, and the traumatized left watched as he and
his wife, the stunning former model Melania, moved into the White House instead.

About Me

Mark is the editor of TruthRevolt and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes about culture and politics for Acculturated, FrontPage Magazine, The Federalist, The New Criterion, and elsewhere. He has made television appearances on CNN, Glenn Beck and elsewhere, as well as many radio and public appearances.
Mark has worked on numerous films including co-writing the award-winning documentary “Jihad in America: The Grand Deception.”
He is currently adapting a book for the big screen and writing one of his own for Templeton Press.